When President Joe Biden dropped out of the race for president on Sunday, he said it was “in the best interest of my party and the country.” He also said he would explain his decision in more detail later that week.
It’s time for those specifics.
Wednesday around 8 p.m. Eastern time, Biden is going to give a speech from the Oval Office. He said he would talk about “what lies ahead and how I will finish the job for the American people.”
Age was always going to be a problem for Biden, who is 81 years old, in the White House race. It became very clear on June 27 when he did badly in a debate against Trump, the Republican nominee.
After the debate, more and more Democrats told Biden they were dropping out of the race. On Sunday, he said that’s exactly what he was going to do and that he supported Vice President Kamala Harris to be his party’s nominee.
Aside from worries about Biden’s age, people have also said worries about how he has been running the U.S. economy over the last three and a half years, as inflation has hurt people’s budgets.
Before going down, the rate of inflation hit a four-decade high above 9% in 2022. Even though inflation has slowed, Americans are still having to deal with high prices. Because of this, Biden’s job approval rating has stayed around 40% this year, while the number of Americans who don’t like his job has stayed above 55%.
Mark Bartash of MarketWatch says that inflation has gone up by a total of 19.4% while Biden has been president. Inflation rose by a total of 7.3% during Trump’s four years in office.
There are many things that economists say cause inflation, such as the fact that Trump and Biden both spent a lot of money on the government to deal with the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economy. They also say that problems with the supply chain during the pandemic, other countries’ stimulus plans, and the Federal Reserve’s decision to keep interest rates too low for too long are to blame.
The performance of the stock market is more telling for Biden.
The S&P 500
As of Tuesday night’s close, SPX -2.31% had gained 44% since Biden’s inauguration on January 20, 2021.
It’s a big jump over about three and a half years, especially considering that the equity gauge fell 19% in 2022 because the Fed tried to fight inflation by raising interest rates.
It’s also a little more than the S&P’s 42% gain at the same point in Trump’s term. Biden is thought to be better in this area, but Trump’s supporters disagree, saying that the market did better under the Republican nominee than under Biden when inflation was taken into account.
So close to an election, a party’s likely presidential nominee has never dropped out. According to the Associated Press, the most similar president was Lyndon B. Johnson, who quit the presidency in March 1968 because he didn’t want to serve another term because he didn’t like the Vietnam War.
